Regretfully, Pat Gunning has his history wrong.  
  
It was not the Christians who were harassing the Muslims.  It was the Muslims who were
moving as conquerors from the 7th century onwards into all parts of the world from Arabia
to East Asia, Africa and Europe, with the crescent as their banner (that is why these wars
of global expansion are called the Crescentades).
  
Specifically the Crescentades were pressing into Europe.  For example, southern Spain fell
to Crescentades from the south while Constantinople (the capital of the Christian East of
Europe) fell to the Crescentades from the East, which is why its name was changed into
Istanbul, with the Cathedral of St Sophia converted to a mosque and Christians gradually
expelled or assimilated over these years (what happened to all the majority-Christian and
minority-Jewish populations in Turkey and other parts of the Ottoman Empire?   What has
happened to the Christians and Jews in other parts of the Muslim world?  Jordan and Iraq,
for example, used to be up to 20% Christian....The expulsion of Jews and even worshippers
of the original religion of the Iranians (the Parsees) is too well documented to need
repeating here.  And Pat Gunning seems to have entirely forgotten the Armenian genocide...
Naturally, it was not just Christians and Jews who were oppressed, expelled or killed.
Muslim elites repressed also those, such as the Kurds, who wished to keep their own
religion....).
  
The Crescentades used the wealth and populace of each newly conquered area to finance and
augment their army for their attack into the next territory.  Muslim Empires quickly
became more populous, richer and better organised militarily than any other Empire or
kingdom they encountered - more or less right across the world (a situation that continued
at least till the 18th c. and in many parts of the world into the late 19th c).
  
Europe had little choice but to respond to the Crescentades with the Crusades (which, I
take it, is what Pat Gunning is referring to...).
   
It intrigues me that Westerners are so keen to falsify history and attack their own
cultural roots.
  
Looking only at the tolerant and culturally rich phases of Muslim empires attracts
contemporary Westerners (and every other liberal, such as myself).
  
But the most liberal phases of Muslim empires were certainly much less liberal than the
liberties that have been built in the West from the time of the Reformation, which
reshaped Europe over some two centuries, starting from a much-weaker starting point to a
position more or less of equality with the Muslim world ONLY by the eighteenth century
(Pat Gunning, please note) and thereafter gradually to a stronger, more prosperous and
.more advanced civilisation - acknowledged as such even by the Muslims themselves starting
in the twentieth century.
  
Moreover, it is not only that Muslim empires have had non-liberal phases (every empire
probably does so)
  
It is also that, when Muslim empires have sought to be most true to Islam (e.g. under the
Emperor Aurangzeb in the Mughal Empire) they have closed in on themselves and become
regressive economically, socially, culturally, intellectually and in every other way.
  
However, whenever Muslim empires have been most UNtrue to Islam and opened themselves to
non-Islamic influences (e.g. under the Emperor Akbar), their empires have made economic,
social, cultural and intellectual progress.
  
Broadly, it is possible to delineate Muslim openness to non-Islamic influences, and
therefore to progress, in the following way:
  
(a) to Jewish and Christian influence as a result of conquering the Levant,     North
Africa/southern Spain and what was then Eastern Europe.  All that we      admire among
Muslim thinkers in medieval times was a result of their    absorbing Greek and Roman
intellectual and cultural influences from Jewish      and Christian sources.  However,
having sucked these dry, the Muslim world      did not produce anything original of its
own, intellectually speaking, and turned       in on itself.
  
(b) to Persian and Hindu influence as a result of conquering what are now Iran  and the
Indian subcontinent (this resulted in Muslims picking up not merely     Hindu mathematics
and other areas of knowledge, but also in the most    attractive of Muslim art, music and
cuisine - which can hold its own against any competitor in these fields in the world)
  
(c) to modern influences from the 19th c onwards, resulting in e.g. the reform  efforts of
Muhammad Ali in Egypt, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II and the     authors of the 1906
revolution in Persia - all of whom sought to import versions of the western model of
constitutional government, civil law, secular education, industrial and all other socio-
cultural-political-scientific-technical institutions that had been developed by the then-
Christian West.
  
Across the whole of the Muslim world, railways and telegraphs lines were built, Western-
style schools and universities were opened, and a new class of  political leaders,
administrators, army officers, lawyers and teachers emerged with Western-style education,
challenging the traditional intellectual hegemony of "merely Koranic" scholars.
  
That "wave" of reform continues to this day, right across the Muslim world, challenged at
points (Iran, Al-Qaeda) by reactionaries who wish to take themselves as well as the rest
of the world back into the world of "pure" Islam.
  
The interesting thing about Islam is that it started as a reforming movement before
becoming a military movement - religious reform movements often regretfully try to enlist
state power for their purposes, forgetting that power corrupts....
(Muslims should have learned from the impact of Constantine on early Christianity!  And
the religious right in the USA does not seem to have learnt that from its own Christian
history either, even now!)
  
In any case, the result is that Islam (in the form it is known in most of the world today)
has become a conservative or even reactionary force so that the Muslim parts of the world
are now caught in a sort of civil war between modernity and "pure" Islam.
  
Those from the Muslim world who have "escaped" from the Muslim parts of the world and live
in the liberal West, naturally have no problem both enjoying the intellectual, social,
political and economic freedoms of the West and practising a liberal form of Islam (which
is privatised) - for which they are reviled by those who wish to live by the more
encompassing religion of the Koran which recognises no difference between Church and
State, and would like to bring the whole of civil law into convergence with Islam/ the
Koran/ Sharia.
  
So much for the likelihood of Islamic societies ever arriving at the "victory of reason"  
  
Prabhu Guptara